Let’s free safecoin

Autonomi Network Token (incl (e)MAID)
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Hello,

I have been invited by @frabrunelle to copy my post here instead of forum.safedev.org :

Hello,

I found the whole MaidSafe project impressive and ambitious except this “safecoin” story. Creating money by algorithm is a technological progress but why not freeing it fully respecting the Relative Theory of Money?
You might have a look at the way duniter is working to allow all members to co-create money through a Universal Dividend (kind of basic income).
Don’t take me wrong, I find the idea great to pay those who participate to make MaidSafe working by allocating space on their server and stuff. I’m just inviting you to think about an other way for the creation of the money.
And why not directly using the one existing, G1?

Regards,
Thatoo

I copy/paste also one answer that has been written by @michaelsproul :

Duniter’s ideas look interesting, but I’d have to think more about whether we could apply them to the SAFE network. They rely on a PGP-style web of trust to ensure that 1 network account = 1 real person, which is quite different to the SAFE network where everything is currently anonymous.

For anyone else interested in reading more, I found these pages most useful:

https://en.duniter.org/presentation/

https://en.duniter.org/theoretical/

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I’m always interested in concepts about money creation etc, though I don’t understand what you’re suggesting here.

Without referring to other articles / posts / theories, can you write a brief outline of the concept you’re suggesting for Safecoin creation / distribution?

E.g. what is the Relative Theory of Money, what is Duniter proposing, and why would these things be good for Safecoin & the Safe network?

Well worth exploring any options ahead of the implementation of test safecoin.

As you’ve mentioned, Safecoin’s reason for existing is to incentivise the provision of resources to the network, so any secondary goals must not get in the way of the primary aim, though there’s nothing to stop new complimentary currencies being built on top of the Safe network that have different aims / methods of distribution etc.

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You can find the Relative Theory of Money here : http://en.trm.creationmonetaire.info/

If safecoin is used only to is to incentivise the provision of resources to the network, then it will not get value. A money needs exchanges for people to trust its value. So people needs to use safecoin for other thing also, not just one thing, don’t you think?
If because you contribute to the network you receive safecoin why would you care if you can’t use these safecoin. But I’m sure you know that. So saying that a currencie should have a goal, an aim and not a secondary one, doesn’t make sense to me.

Once that says, you can always pay members that contribute to the network with any money yo want, it could be bitcoin, euro or G1, it will be incentive only if people trust the money.

Now, my offer is to think about on what do you base the creation of money. Do you base it on gold, on debt, on bit or on human time? If you want to free member of a monetary system, it has to be on the only value you can’t remove from economy.
Can you remove gold and still have an economy running?
Can you remove debt and still have an economy running?
Can you remove bits and still have an economy running?
Can you remove humans (time) and still have an economy running?

Regards,
Thatoo

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You burn/destroy SAFEcoins when you use them to store data on the network. They are more of a utility than currency by design, though they will inevitably be used currency because they are such a convenient option for that task.

Because they have a high utility value there’s a different level of incentive and demand to a simple material one.

I agree with David though [quote=“DavidMc0, post:2, topic:13060”]
though there’s nothing to stop new complimentary currencies being built on top of the Safe network that have different aims / methods of distribution etc.
[/quote]

There’s plenty of room for new ideas on blockchianless infrastructure that scales, is private, has no fees, no PoW and is instant. Creating other coins on SAFE is inevitable and desirable. If you have some ideas I’d love to see them sketched out further. :slight_smile:

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I’m asking you to summarise the theory and explain why it is intersting to the Safe network or for Safecoin - I don’t want to go and research a theory without knowing what benefits it may offer.

Safecoin is required to buy Safe network resources, and is rewarded to those who provide the resources, so Safecoin creation is based on, or backed by computing resources.

It will have intrinsic value in that it can always be used to buy Safe network resources (e.g. storage for files, hosting websites, and in the future, computing resources etc, plus being used to buy other Safe based assets / tokens (e.g. Project Decorum Clikes etc).

I’m not saying that Safecoin shouldn’t have any secondary aims if they make sense, but they cannot be accepted if they compromise the primary usage, e.g. if they somehow make Safecoin less appropriate for its role in network resource incensivisation.

An autonomous network can’t accept and distribute Euros, and the Safe network isn’t compatible with Bitcoin or anything else, so cannot issue these to those who provide resources to the network.

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I can’t summarize better than this 1000 words page : https://en.duniter.org/theoretical/

If you can’t find benefit by yourself from Freedom after investigating that, I’m sorry but same as your time is precious (as you said earlier, and that’s why a free money is based on human time, for its universality), my time is also precious and I have made the first effort coming to you, now it’s your turn.

Regards,
Thatoo

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SAFEcoin does seem to make a lot of headway in solving both spatial-asymmetry and temporal-asymmetry from what I have read in that link…

Spatial - anyone can farm, unlike mining. Spare (free) is more competitive than economies-of-scale (cheap), so farming tends to decentralisation and because the barriers to entry are simple hardware and internet connection, SAFE is far more accessible with almost no barriers to entry (smart phone and unlimited broadband and half a dozen clicks are all you should need).

Temporal - because the coins are burned when used they then become available again for farmers. The total supply is finite, but given the utility and that most users will have received their coins for free, one would expect a large number of these coins to be burned each day. The greater the demand for the network resources the more are being burned and the more are available to be farmed by new resource providers.

Also, no PoW or blockchain etc ofc in SAFE.

There are probably other ways to solve these kinds of problems with currency allocation, but as David said, SAFEcoin needs to be fit for purpose first, it is the incentive mechanism, so it must remain a reward or none of the rest of the system would work. That doesn’t mean you can’t take your ideas further with a different coin on SAFE though, but I don’t think they could be piggy-backed on to the current safecoin design. I can’t see how anyway. :slight_smile:

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Would be selling my coins as quickly as possible if the project headed in a direction like this

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I think he just doesn’t understand that exchanges will be built.

That’s why he’s worried, and bringing this up.

But they will be!. So don’t worry. It will become real money.

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It sounds like stuff and promises of stuff are being conflated. Without the stuff, what is being promised?

Safecoin represents storage stuff. How you want to make promises (extend credit) against it is a different problem. It is the layer above on the monetary stack.

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On a quick pass of duniter, I wondered it was little useful until you have a large enough network. Individuals remote from existing users - the majority, would struggle to get acknowledged beyond the stranger they are. Also, I wonder any small group with bad intent could just acknowledge a run of fake accounts for profit. Why would you trust individuals more than a blockchain… individuals are not trustworthy, especially where money is concerned. If you trust every individual, then of course a web of them endorse other new comers works but every group default to the lowest common denominator… and that would be eventually those who do not have the best interests of the network at heart. Also, I wonder the premise of duniter fails relative to SAFE, since storage of a large blockchain is trivial and perhaps the options to validate the next link in the chain are equally simple on the back of SAFE network being inherently capable of noting its own decentralized trust. but that was a quick pass and perhaps I’m missing the point.

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You don’t trust a machine, or at least not yet, a machine execute orders!
Trust is only between peers! People who don’t understand the essence of internet, TCP/IP can’t understand the philosophy behind the concept of “peer to peer”.
Peer to Peer it means you recognize the other one as your peer. Do you? or other human being are not as worthy as you?

An other concept that people have difficulty with is Freedom. In economy, on of the freedom is to be free to use the money you want. If you force members of SAFE to use only one currency, you restrain their freedom, don’t you?

Again one more time, I didn’t came to talk about technique, blockchain, WoT but about the concept of free money described by the Relative Theory of Money. You could even do it with papers and pens if you want.
The question I’m asking you to think about id : who is creating money? and how?

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From the article you shared:

Miners should be rewared another way, but not by money issuance.

It seems to gloss over this point as though it is a trivial dilemma, but it is not. Unless Duniter can present genuine solutions to this difficult problem, I don’t see that it is a credible hypothesis.

Moreover, the article gives no indication of how dividends should be distributed. If all participants of the network received the same dividends, the rate of inflation would equal the rate of interest, and the increase in purchasing power would be exactly equal to 0. As a result, those entering the network at a later stage would not be able to gain a meaningful sum of money simply via dividends, and they would still have to trade their labour to earn currency, which is something that article specifically denounces.

If people entering the network at a later stage (A) received a higher rate of dividends than those who entered at an earlier stage (B), then you would be consistently distributing wealth from B to A. That would incentivise people to avoid joining the network until later.

Really what you have here is a blueprint for a Marxist cryptocurrency. Without commenting on the justness of Marxism itself, you’re asking Maidsafe to essentially change the economic relationship between network participants based on an economic context that it isn’t operating in. It could cripple the project.

No one is forcing them to do that. Participants in the network are quite free to simultaneously use other cryptocurrencies or to leave the network altogether.

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False, there is no inflation in relative perspective. I invite you to give it a try, make a simulation dividing everything over time by the amount of the Universal Dividend…

wrong, hey’ll get the same relative part than others as the Universal Dividend increase over time following monetary mass and numbers of members.

wrong again, creation of money isn’t a redistribution…

Godwin’s law…

I don’t ask, you are free, I’m giving you an information. You are free to learn by yourself and make your decision.

Users don’t have to pay the service in one specific money?

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If you cannot explain it simply you do not understand it.

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Good to see someone else having gotten the same idea.
I only recently discovered what MaidSafe was about besides the coin, but was working on a personal web server project prior to that with the intention of running Duniter on it and later SafeCoin and later a combination.
Silly me did not look further into Maidsafe to know what this was really about.

Anyway,

Duniter is a cryptocoin platform where anyone can start their own cryptocoin with the following properties:

  • You get the ability to add X users to the network by trusting them, who in turn can add X users by trusting them.
  • Everyone in the network gets Y% free samples of said coin to everyone at every interval I.

And the reason I think this will be a success is:

Money is a good, a network externality good. Mining/Farming restricts that to only a small percentage of computer savvy people.
The Calvinistic ideology of “money = work”, thus we need a form of Proof of Work, is silliness derived from a soon to be bygone non-automated era. Running as much electricity as you can through a box, then buying a bigger and better box to run even more electricity through it and then calling it “money earned through hard work” is a joke. You’re deluding yourself if you think that you can continue like this and pretend that you’re still actually working. Cryptocoin mining is not physical work folks. All it is is a waste of electricity that can be better used to transport, heat, illuminate and construct other products.

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Thank you for sharing. I find the ideas behind Duniter appealing, and I’ll investigate further. But I don’t see (yet) how the ideas and techniques behind SAFEcoin and Duniter can work together, even if maybe the ideal cryptocurrency would be a combination of both concepts.

SAFEcoin’s incentive (as was said) is to ensure and enlarge the SAFE network and its storage space. It rewards ownership of bandwidth (plus a bit of cpu power and storage space) and as such doesn’t try to change capitalism. Duniter’s incentive is a just economy. They’re not competing, but are mostly orthogonal. While SAFEcoin usage will grow, if SAFEnet is attractive, Duniter has the hen-egg problem of every LETS or altcoin – it’s only interesting if I can buy something with it, and therefore it needs a critical mass of users.

I see a problem of Duniter (like most other cryptocurrencies) in its ever growing blockchain. As far as I understand, that’s the biggest technical problem of Bitcoin. That might not become Duniter’s crux, since its network is limited by the WoT factor and its calculations are not that slow. But this seems to be a problem that SAFEcoin avoids if it stores only the last transaction.

The WoT is a problem in becoming a Duniter member – everyone must know (personally?) one or more Duniter members, if I didn’t misunderstand. The threshold to become part of the SAFE network is much lower.

While SAFE focuses on anonymity, Duniter focuses on transparency: Every transaction can be looked up, and all participants are publicly known. If I understood right, SAFE solved the problem of trust (in a technical sense) between anonymous participants.
While Duniter’s basic income (Universal Dividend) is something I support, it needs to rely on unique accounts of real persons to be fair/just. WoT is an answer to that, and I don’t know a better one (that doesn’t mean there is no better one – I don’t know much about cryptography in the first place).

I’d appreciate if Duniter would cut away the blockchain and its transparency and instead would use a system of anonymous transactions that aren’t stored forever, as SAFEcoin will do. I don’t know if that’s technically possible.

So, while I guess it could be interesting to have a UD currency on top of SAFEnet, it can’t replace SAFEcoin, because SAFEcoin is too closely linked with SAFEnet infrastructure. And while a WoT might link to SAFEnet accounts, those are not meant to be unique and/or equivalent to real persons, but more like usual web accounts – everyone can have as many as (s)he can handle.

SAFEnet replaces (some parts of) the internet – Duniter replaces (parts of) capitalism. :wink:

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Isn’t this the point to which mining diverges from storage/network ‘farming’?

When mining, you’re simply crunching to reveal the solution for decrypting. There’s no social utility in this - no one can use my crunching to find extraterrestrial life or a cure for cancer - because those computational cycles are spent doing something else.

Storage/network farming is the polar opposite. There’s pure social utility, providing others with capacity they don’t have natively, providing resources in exchange for cybercurrency.

If you want to store your extraneous boxes of personal belongings, boat or RV, you can go to a site which will physically allow you to store those things. It may not be work by your definition, since they just sit there in storage, but the ability to store them has value and attracts people with cash who need the ability to store their stuff.

Duniter may have some truths on the page. However, those, much like Godel’s theorem of incompleteness states, will only be a small portion of the universe of truths. One need not explain, or understand, the universe, by trying to explain reality in 1000 words on one page. There are many other ways and means, many other explanations and approaches, which will use ‘more’ truths in explaining the universe of cybercurrency and money in general.

It’s great to explore alternative theories of everything, but are they necessary to understanding and using the system at hand?

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I think one of the main upsides to the Safe network is it pretty much solves this problem. You are simply sharing disk space (and later CPU power) which takes little to no computer knowledge besides clicking some buttons to agree, and to decide how much disk space to share. Most people at least have a basic understanding of what disk space is, and can look up in Windows Explorer how much they have free. I also imagine there would eventually be (or maybe right away) some kind of dynamic system where if the user’s hard drive hits ~80% full, it would start to release Safe Network resources from the disk to free up user space.

I imagine CPU usage would work the same way, much like Folding @ Home or the SETI @ Home projects, where it only takes up idle CPU dynamically.

While I agree with a UBI system, I think you are misunderstanding the usage of mining, because it actually is doing work. Yes, you aren’t doing physical labor, but non-physical labor jobs have existed for millenia. Just because a machine is doing the work on your behalf, does not mean your resources are not being used, which they are, via electricity. Those resources are being used to write and verify information to the blockchain which can be useful, especially with the idea of Smart Contracts that was introduced by Ethereum.

Safecoin also has intrinsic value, because it is essentially a commodity backed currency, backed by network disk space (and later CPU). Just like in a gold standard, you can “trade in” your Safecoin for disk space. In turn, farming has intrinsic value, and should be rewarded, because your disk space is adding societal value to the network. If you remove farming from the equation, there is no incentive to share resources beyond that of societal well being. Some people would surely share their disk space and bandwidth under this system, but not nearly enough to sustain it.

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“… the usage of mining, because it actually is doing work.”

Reminiscent of Physics 101. The old, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Our instructor had the class line up against one of the brick walls of the classroom and instructed us to push with all our might. Did the wall fall down? No, thankfully. Did we expend energy, get tired, work up a sweat? Yes, definitely.

While I see more differences than similarities between mining and farming, with regard to work, utility, community value, etc, understanding either/both simply serves to bring into question the Duniter theory.

What the OP seems to have done is assumed the theory to be true and then expected the universe to prove it. What we’re talking about is hypothesis testing wherein there’s an obligation to prove the theorem true before judging the universe as having revolved around it.

In this case, the theory is no proven theorem. It’s interesting. It might have several truths. It might not. It could be an interesting bit of banter that’s great after you’ve had a few beverages, or a combination of these ‘mights’. True or false, it’s an interesting take on things.